Every Stitch I make

Sunday, 27 July 2014

OK, I
know I’ve been really quite lately, but this time I have a really good
excuse!I GOT A JOB!!!

Yes,
really, a real, paying, 9 to 5 job.

Despite
sending literally hundreds of applications off into the black hole of the
internet, the job I ended up with I didn’t actually apply for.In a roundabout sort of way I can sort
of thank the Auckland Sewing collective for throwing me into the right path.A couple of months ago we met up in a café in
Mount Albert one Sunday morning.I
arrived a few minutes early so went and ordered (and paid for incidentally) my coffee
and while I was queuing at the cash register I spotted a vague acquaintance,
sort of friend who I hadn’t seen for literally years.We exchanged the usual greetings and I
mentioned that I had been made redundant and was looking for work if he heard
of anything (because I’d been job hunting for so long that I have no
shame).The coffee arrived and I went and
found the other sewists and had a lovely get together.

I thought
nothing more of the encounter until about two weeks later when I got a call
from him.He’d just had a resignation,
she didn’t really want to work her notice and had only been there about a month
so didn’t really have anything useful to handover.He didn’t want to go through the whole
advertising, hundreds of cv’s and interviewing again, so could I start on
Monday?

So... I’m
gainfully employed again!

I can at long
last wear the working wardrobe that I have been sewing for the last eleven
months.

It’s a fairly casual
environment, so I started with black pants and a shirt that I made over
Christmas.

I decided to spend some time perfecting the classic shirt. I drafted a basic shirt and
got the fit right even over the bust, which is always an issue for me. I had a white shirting with a self coloured stripe that I'd bought on line for $1.20 a metre. I made a plain white shirt with it intending it to be a sort of wearble muslin, but I was happy withn the finished shirt:

I then
decided that I wanted to replicate the shaping of this cardigan in a woven
fabric and shirt type design.starting from the pattern that I had perfected I put the
stripe across the shirt rather than up and down and played with pleats into the
button band:

It took a
bit of fiddling to get it right and the pleats changed the direction of the
stripes at the top half of the front, but it isn’t a bad effect, and like the
stretch cardi that I made it is a great shape for the larger than B cup bust without
an excessive amount of fabric floating round the waist.

I even wore this jacket, which I wasn’t in
love with when I made it, but actually doesn’t look too bad.

The job
is very close to a railway station on the same line as where I live, so Im
taking the train to work.It’s a direct
trip and I couldn’t drive it in time that the train takes.I pour the last of the coffee into my travel
mug …

Yes, I made my coffee mug an embroidered coat!

… as I
leave for the station, and sit on the train with my ipod and knitting (yes I am
that mad woman who knits on the train), and usually by the time I’ve finished
my coffee the train is just arriving at work.It’s a really civilised way to commute, which is also improving my
knitting output!

The one
down side of having a job is a lack of time to doing sewing related stuff.

I was really interested in Project Indie and
intended to put in one of my recent designs that I had drafted.While drafting it in multiple sizes was quite
simple, the process of digitising it required way more time and IT skills than
I have.I spent two weekends trying to
figure out how to do it, and feeling guilty about doing anything else before it
dawned on me that I was spoiling my weekends and not sewing stuff that I was
interested in because I thought I “should” get a pattern entered.What was I thinking? While it might have made
sense when I had the time, I have a new job which I’m having to get to grips
with.I don’t have the IT skills, nor
the brain space to learn at the moment.All I was doing was spoiling my weekends feeling guilty about not being
able to do it.So I’ve let that one
go.I’m just not techie savvy enough.

In the
meantime I’m enjoying being back at work and enjoying having more than 50c left
at the end of the week.I could even buy
some more fabric!

Wednesday, 21 May 2014

A while ago I was given a box of fabric bits and
pieces from a friend’s mother, who is now in her nineties and hasn’t sewn for
years.

As well as some lovely vintage
prints she had started making herself a pair of trousers out of this wool.

It’s a heavy wool and almost a bit scratchy, but I
love the tweedy look.The lady is a lot smaller
than me, so there was no way I was going to be able to simply complete the
trousers for me, so I carefully unpicked the half made trousers and assessed
the fabric that I was left with, with a view to making a skirt.

The pieces that I had weren’t wide enough to make a
straight skirt, so I had to be a bit more creative.The back was a simple fix – I put a curved
godet in the centre back seam, drafted from my skirt block using the same
technique that I used here.

Although it is a very subtle effect, I also added a
little embroidery to the two back panels – just because I can!

At this point I stalled slightly, while I figured
out what to do with the gap in the front.Eventually I added a panel to the front lining and attached layer upon
layer of stone coloured chiffon ruffles from the $1 stash.It sort of looks as though I’ve vomited
chiffon down the front of the skirt.

Or maybe it’s just a cute play on the hard and soft
of the tweed and the ruffles?

Here’s my dilemma:When my daughter was living at home she would sometimes come home from
school, look at my current project on the dummy and yell “STOP! Move away from the fabric
Mum.”This was her sign that I had gone,
or was about to go, over the top.With
no resident daughter to rein me in I wonder whether I’ve gone too far with the
ruffles and embroidery here?

Internet: Well sometimes life gets in the way and
you just don’t have any sewing projects to show us?

Me: I have twenty-seven finish garments that I
haven’t blogged about, nineteen of which I have sewed in the last month.

Internet: So what’s the problem?Why no posts?

Me: I’m not sure.

Internet:Well you’re here now, so get on with it.

OK, I
decided that I needed a new suit but this post covers several garments that
evolved out of the suit that sort of go together, so I guess you could call it a
collection.

As is
frequently the case with me, this collection started with the fabric; a
textured bottle green of unknown origin (more cheap fabric off trade me).

I’m not sure what appealed to me about this fabric,
since I have no other bottle green in my wardrobe, probably because my high
school uniform was bottle green, so I have an irrational prejudice against the
colour.I can only assume I had a
momentary flash of clarity that suggested that thirty years was long enough to
hold a grudge against the colour.

Anyhow, I
bought the fabric and from the moment that it arrived in the post it said “trouser
suit”.At least it said “suit”, but the
soft handle spoke of an elegant trouser suit.

I do like smart trousers, but the
only appearance in my wardrobe at the moment is a pair of black pants, so the
green pants came first.

I used my
pant block, and didn’t add any additional features like pockets and stuff.I love pockets in trousers, and I always use
them.In fact I use them so much that I
typically stretch the fabric at my hips so that I get additional saddle bags
with only a few months of wear.The
reason that I still have the black pants in my wardrobe is that they have no
pockets, so I haven’t pulled them out of shape.

Learning from the black pants, these trousers have no pockets, so I can’t
over stuff them out of shape.

I first
used them to go out to dinner to a friend whose garden backs onto a slow
running river.It’s so slow running that
it’s more a sort of mobile lake, and there are always insects around her
place.Since the local mosquito
population rings the dinner bell when I expose flesh at her place, I decided
that smart pant were the way to go.

Unfortunately, since I have no other bottle
green in my wardrobe, I didn’t have anything to wear with it, so I resurrected Project
40, from my 2013 sewing list, a white flowered sleeveless blouse.The flowers on this fabric have bottle green leaves,
so I dusted off an old Burda pattern (which I drafted before I had so many Burda
patterns that I have to label them properly, so I can’t tell you which one) Allowing for a little extra weight since I
drafted it, it came together easily.

In
retrospect I should’ve checked the fit before I started as it came out rather
loose, and although I added bra cups it didn’t offer any support, and a bra
wasn’t an option.

While this might not
have bothered me twenty years ago, it bothers me now, so I ended up taking it
in.The end result is that it looks
rather snug, but at least I didn’t fall out of it.

At this
point progress sort of stalled, until I was called to an interview for a job
that I knew was going to require a fair amount of mobility, so I decided I
needed a pant suit for the occasion.

Although
I have numerous TNT jacket patterns I
had fallen in love with this one from Burda April 2013.

I wanted something a little softer than a
classic tailored jacket, and I felt that this would go with the trousers.

I really
enjoyed this project.It came together
really easily (As usual I didn’t actually ready Burda’s instructions so I can’t
comment on them) and I like the softer feel of this jacket.

To lift it out of the ordinary I added a paua
shell lining, and I love it, even though I’m the
only person to see it.

(Since
the top I made to go with the trousers wasn’t office appropriate, I paired the
suit with a plain white blouse for the interview.)

A few weeks ago I was sorting through my stash, and
I came across a green drill labelled “Project 41” in a bag with a zip and
waistband interfacing.I’m embarrassed
to admit that I had no idea what I had intended to do with this fabric, but I
must have had a plan, since it had made it to my 2013 plans, if not the sewing
machine.

I’m sure you can imagine my horror when I
discovered that project was a pair of tailored green pants.I had bought fabric when I didn’t need
it!Rather than admit this sin to the
world at large, I decided that I had to destroy the evidence immediately and
get this fabric out of my stash.I also
wanted to demonstrate how I put a lined dress together so this bottle green
fabric became a lined dress.

Monday, 14 April 2014

The Monthly Stitch challenge for April is "sewing double". The exact interpetation of this wa left pretty open, so my first interpretation is sewing my version of a ready to wear, and sewing two garments from the same pattern:

I had a
go and drafting a copy and came up with a more-or-less wearable muslin.

The
embroidery is misplaced and not properly interfaced, but I was happy that the
pattern incorporated all the features that I loved about the Farmers’ version.

I had plenty of black knit from the $1 stash, but didn’t have
anything for the feature print.I found
a stretch mesh.It has a suitable
pattern, but it is see through.I faced
the first version, but I lined the next one with a lightweight black knit,
which solve the see-through problem, and meant that I didn’t need facing. Other than that, I made it the same as the wearable muslin.

I think that this is reasonable copy of the Farmers’
T and I can see it working well with black or grey in a professional
environment, and the muslin makes a flattering casual top.